Tolerance in Art: A joint exhibition of Slovak and Hungarian Art, 14/03/3009-26/04/2009
At the end of March the Slovak Foreign Minster, Miroslav Lajčák and his Hungarian counterpart, Kinga Göncz, presented an award to the former Czechoslovak ambassador to Hungary Rudolf Chmel for ‘good neighbourliness and understanding’ in Slovak-Hungarian relations. In a speech he gave when he accepted the award, Chmel said that a foundation supporting cultural, artistic and sporting activities should be established to further the cause of good relations between the two countries.
A week later Ivan Gašparovič won his second term as President of Slovakia backed by, among others, the leader of the Slovak National Party, Ján Slota, a man who has been quoted as saying ‘we will sit in our tanks and destroy Budapest’. One election observer, the political scientist László Öllős, commented that the methods used in Gašparovič’s campaign will remain for the foreseeable future. These methods include playing the Hungarian card: using Hungary and its imperial rule of Slovakia up until 1918 as a scapegoat for Slovakia’s ills and a focus for nationalism.
Against this background, Danubiana, the Meulensteen Art Museum on the banks of the Danube south of Bratislava, is presenting a collection of contemporary Slovak and Hungarian Art with the intention of using culture to ‘enhance as well as fulfill the principle of tolerance’. The exhibition, entitled Tolerance in Art, brings together a diverse collection of visual and multimedia art, including video, photography, sculpture and collage. Chosen by the Slovak Union of Visual Artists and the director of the City Museum in Győr, the art on display explores both directly and indirectly the concept of tolerance and what it means in the artistic as well as the political sphere.
Tolerance is defined as the act of allowing something, but also as the indulgence of beliefs and acts that deviate from your own or a perceived norm. Hodinar by Otis Laubert, a leather jacket covered in watch faces, seems to embrace this definition wholeheartedly. The watches, which appear to have been rescued from bins and second-hand shops, include images of cartoon cats, babies and the Virgin Mary. Attached to the jacket, they seem to revel in their tackiness and hint that only in detritus does tolerance happily exist. All objects are disregarded in the end, so why can they not live without value judgments being placed on them?
In the same room as the Laubert piece, you encounter a very different take on tolerance. In the corner of the room is a sculpture by Katarina Galovič-Gáspár called Rujojemnik. It shows a man on his knees with his head downcast, his body wrapped in an orange robe, his hands bound behind his back; against the wall beside him are an old silver television and a video player. It is impossible to avoid comparisons with the way the US have dressed detainees at Guantanamo Bay and, the moment you see it, you are aware of the lack of tolerance the image portrays. You do not see the man’s face – it could also be a woman – and in reducing the human to an image you perform a further act of intolerance. You do not understand them. You do not even attempt to. Who they are and what they believe is irrelevant. They are only symbols.
The lengths to which tolerance can be stretched are explored in a less direct way by many of the abstract pieces on display, the kind of art the layman looks at and says: “I could do that.” 4x4 by Rákóczi Gizella shows four colours (pink, green, grey and yellow) painted in four squares on a canvas. The colours merge and seem to indicate, through exploring what colours are produced when they are mixed, that the very act of merging is worthwhile – it shows a willingness to experiment and move beyond the boundaries of the fixed colours of the palette. Nr.16 by Nádler István, a canvas dominated by thick blue stripes painted horizontally across it on a faded yellow background, could be seen as a challenge to the viewer to see how far they can tolerate this kind of art. It tells you to interpret it yourself and in doing this the piece almost becomes a definition of tolerance, the canvas unable to control the interpretations put on it. This lack of control makes the painting worrying, a feeling enhanced by the black lines that cut violently into the blue stripes: is nothing true? Should everything be permitted?
According to the curators, the exhibition ‘does not trace the artistic and aesthetic development of a particular period’ and this wide remit means that, although the exhibits can be read as expressions of tolerance, the works on display live beyond that narrow definition. On the first floor, for example, you encounter Batman na vozičku, or Batman in a Wheelchair, by Robert Bielik, a painting of the superhero sitting abject and defeated in all his fighting garb. In the wheelchair, he becomes unlike the man we go to for help in times of crisis, and the painting as a whole seems to be a comment on the mass of superhero films that have been produced during the War On Terror, films we use for a bit of escapism just as during the Cold War we lost ourselves in Sci-Fi. Batman cannot save us: if he were real, he’d be a cripple.
At the beginning of November last year, violence erupted at a football match between Slovan Bratislava and DAC, a team from the mainly Hungarian town of Dunajská Streda in southern Slovakia. Within days there were protests outside the Slovak embassy in Budapest. The Slovak Deputy Prime Minister Dušan Čaplovič, who had attended the match, blamed Hungarian fans for the riots, saying they came to Slovakia to ‘do damage to Slovak-Hungarian relations’. Speaking at the time, the President Ivan Gašparovič said: “I consider it abnormal that a large amount of extremists among fans perceive a football stadium as a place and a football match as a means for addressing historical and political events.”
In many ways, Tolerance in Art directly addresses these historical and political issues yet, although it might be a more appropriate place to do so than a football match, the relevance of these issues is undermined by the art itself. One of the first sculptures you see is of a man carved out of a tree trunk, his head cut into a Pharaoh-esque shape, his arms spread and his palms up in an expression of openness and tolerance as if he is pleading for understanding. The sculpture is by Juraj Čutek and is of J.G. Deburau, a nineteenth century mime artist.
For more information see http://www.danubiana.sk/eng/index.html
